Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

All that for a worthless degree in antaractic penguin studies from Shady St Univ. You still graduate unemployed, unskilled, but instead of you paying the debt, someone else does.

Also, with no skin in the game, I’m sure college will get even less serious.

View on HN

You prefer an under-educated population? The most valuable asset we have in the technology and service based economies is human capital. We need a creative and educated population to continue to compete. I think we should eliminate all for-profit education and preferably make all universities public.

Under educated population is a disaster, but that problem starts about 12 years before college, in a different all public/free education system.

Jamming more people through mediocre and worse college programs to get worthless degrees is a waste of time and money.

Why do you assume that degrees are "worthless?" How are you defining "worthless?" Based on the research, getting a degree significantly increases your earning potential. But I would argue that even if that wasn't the case and everyone got philosophy, literature, and history degrees, our country would be significantly better positioned globally.

And I agree with your statement that the problem starts earlier. Although most of our issues with primary and secondary public education can be traced to poverty and racism. So, I think we should raise taxes to address those as well :D.

You have to be careful with conflating causality. As we turn college more and more into highschool 2.0, we're going to see the correlation with increased earnings start to deteriorate. There's a simple matter that we're greatly increasing the supply of college educated individuals which, in turn, will have a diminishing effect on their demand which will drive earnings down. The only way this will not happen is if there's a proportional (which is to say sharp) increase in the number of available and desirable positions for college educated individuals.

This is also ignoring that we've greatly widened the demographic attending colleges. The reduced selectivity means that the average person is not going to be as top-notch as they were at one time, which means that the average expectation of an individual with a college degree will also go down. This will also have an aggregate depressing effect on our earning:education correlation. More important than ever will become median earnings for college graduates. The top graduates are earning vastly more than ever before which will mask the overall problem.

I’m referring to all the unemployed and underemployed college graduates complaining about the debt they are in. Simplify transferring the debt somewhere else isn’t fixing anything, it is just shifting the drain on society. College is highly useful for some people, and not others. We should do more to make sure it is available to those who would benefit, and offer different things for those who prefer or need trade skills.

Why do you proceed from the assumption that degrees have worth and demand that we prove that statement to be false?

In the real world it is the opposite - you assume the degree is worthless until you demonstrate the otherwise

Worthless = "no employer willing to pay good money for the skills or knowledge you acquired"

> You prefer an under-educated population

Who is undereducated? We managed to create a civilization that went to the moon back when the vast majority of people never went to college. Germany continues to be a leading industrial power while lagging most of Western Europe in college statistics (especially "academic" college like we have in the U.S.)

Is it possible to simultaneously have an over-educated population and an under-educated population? I am having a hard time squaring the two prevailing ideas on this issue. One is that we need more/free education because an educated population is best. The other is that we need to import vast amounts of new unskilled labor so we have someone to pick our fruit. I realize you only espoused one of these ideas, but I am curious if someone holds both those positions and would help me understand how both can be true at the same time.

If you define "educated" to be an expensive and worthless-to-the-world degree, then I am totally fine with an "under-educated" population.

People will still go for the degrees they go for today, which for the most part are degrees they believe will provide a good return on their investment of _time_. On top of that, unis would need to limit how many people are accepted to a penguin program, because how many qualified teachers can they throw at that?

Beyond admissions quotas, I imagine that if gov’t does decide to fully subsidize unis, they too will impose limits per field of study. This is already done in European countries that subsidize uni.

Finally, I think with “guaranteed” gov’t loans, unis have already taken a lot of their skin out of the game. They don’t have to worry about that student defaulting on their loan later, the gov’t does. Or even for private loans. If you had a seemingly infinite bank account, would you penny pinch or see how many new toys you could buy?

Then don't fund Shady St Uni. Put criteria in place for evaluating, and make sure the universities have skin in the game.

(Also, not every degree that doesn't immediately result in you making $250,000/year is worthless. And students are pretty motivated already in pursuing degrees that they see jobs in. Even if your education is free, if you put in 4+ years into something that you can't do anything with, you're still not profiting. Students themselves would still have skin in the game even with free education.)

Ok. Do that first and I might support it. But the guaranteed loans for everyone system of today has not only inflated costs, it supports a bunch of worthless crappy schools. Go look at the list of universities in the US, and find the bottom 100. They are as offensive and wasteful as a $10,000 toilet seat.

I agree. But that's not a product of free education.

It is a product of guaranteed government loans, which makes it “free” for universities to take students.

And here you see a difference between free and "free".

> Also, with no skin in the game, I’m sure college will get even less serious.

Or on the contrary, when students are no longer paying customers who have to be made happy, grading can get stricter

What's wrong with zoology / ornithology today?

Not sure why this is downvoted. There are plenty of degrees that might be useless for making an employer more money, but provide important work for society.

You can study whatever you want, wherever you want, without criticism or question if you are willing to pay your own way.

Very well, but what is your objection to zoology? Normally, people pick an arts subject when arguing about poor-value degrees.

Zoology is a biology course, so there's a general scientific background (research, hypotheses, statistics, modelling etc), and zoology in particular is necessary for understanding the spread of animal pests (e.g. insects eating pests), invasive species, human and animal disease (bird flu?), understanding/recording what is in a particular place (perhaps before construction work, or to guide the planning of that).

The report on the lowest- and highest-paying majors ranks zoology fairly highly -- above chemistry and physics: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/

As we had seen from free education in most of Western Europe.

I believe when most people say “make college free”, they’re referring to a “tuition free” education. There is still a housing cost, which is “skin in the game”.

Eh, my ideal would be like Europe's that gives you a stipend as well to cover room and board. Paying for housing is more than a full time job in a lot of places with universities (particularly the good ones), and ideally we'd want students to be focusing on their studies.

In many of those places in Europe, stipend is really a loan you have to pay back. The terms are regulated but still ain't free money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com